As Christmas approaches we thought we’d pull together a few Christmas themed activities for Primary schools.

Activity 1: Whats the quickest route for Santa?

This is a whole class activity and involves the use of pupil postcodes.  The locations are plotted onto a map,  pupils will then have the ability to see all the locations Santa has to go in order to visit all the pupils in the class.  Pupils should then either work independently or in teams to identify the quickest route for Santa to go.  The amount of combinations should make it an interesting little competition to see who identifies the quickest route!  (Perhaps a Christmas themed prize for the winner

Step 1: Create a excel spreadsheet with the pupils postcode and their name.  NOTE: Make sure the postcode column has ‘postcode’ at the top and the name column has ‘label’ at the top.  Please also ensure that you save the file as a .csv (comma separated value) rather than an .xls.

Step 2: Once you have saved your file in Excel, you need to upload it into Digimap for Schools.  Simply open the annotations toolbar and then go to the markers section and upload your file. Step 3: This is the stage at which you are able to start planning Santa’s route.  You will see all the locations with the pupils name beside it.  You then simply get the pupils to draw a line between the different pupils houses to see which is the quickest route.  You can use the measurement tool to get the length of the individual routes.  Remember you can add some photos to your map also!

Activity 2: Digimap Christmas Jigsaw’s

This can be done either as an online Jigsaw or as a hard copy.  You can generate a series of maps with ‘secret’ Christmas phrases or words that correspond to places on your maps.  E.g.

To create an online Jigsaw I’ve used Jigsaw planet https://www.jigsawplanet.com which is very simple to use and allows you to create your jigsaw.  Alternatively you can simply download a Jigsaw image from Google e.g. http://miamibox.us/puzzle-piece-template.html and place it over your map in Powerpoint.  Here are is an example of both:

These are quite festive little activities which can be all done pretty quickly in Digimap fro Schools.  We wish you all the very best in the run up to Christmas and hope these activities can be of some help!

We’ve created a quick video to show you how to do these tasks above….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pete